


Take Your Licks

by evrybodysdarlin



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Fights, M/M, Tattoos, mild violence, newt is an asshole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 04:45:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1497154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evrybodysdarlin/pseuds/evrybodysdarlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt meets someone who has an unpleasant reaction to his tattoos, and Hannibal Chau helps him out and offers his own weird words of wisdom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Your Licks

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by an anon prompt on my own Tumblr, evrybodysdarlin. Thank you, anon person!
> 
> TW: A little bit of fighting and blood. Cursing. Not much else. I'm shocked that I didn't somehow work smut in, but I didn't this time!

Newt had thought that a consultant job at Hannibal Chau's underground lab would be a pretty cushy gig. Unbelievable Kaiju samples. Fat paycheck. The atmosphere of a Bond villain's secret lair. What's not to love?

Things went smoothly at first. Hannibal himself escorted Newt there, flanked by his ever-present employees, of course. Newt still wasn't sure if they were personal assistants, bodyguards, or some combination of the two. 

Hannibal was paying Newt to study, dissect, and preserve the strange organ that seemed to produce Otachi's bioluminescence. He was convinced that there was money to be made from it somehow, and he wanted Newt on the case. Newt was more than eager to help, and he was especially delighted that they had not one, but two copies of the organ, since Baby Otachi's had been collected as well.

Hannibal rolled his eyes when Newt started happily hyperventilating over the pristine condition of the Kaiju gland laid out before him. "Have fun, kid. You better find something useful, considering what I'm paying you. And don't fuck the tissue up too much. Might sell for something." 

"Oh, I'll be so careful with this baby. You don't even know."

"The way you talk about guts disturbs me, Geiszler. Send someone to get me if you need anything." 

Hannibal stopped at the door and gave the rest of the room a few instructions in Cantonese. He pointed at Newt during part of it. Newt really needed to improve his Cantonese.

All of the lab techs in the room were bundled up in full-body protective suits, but Newt decided that he should be fine with gloves and a face mask, plus the usual protection provided by his own glasses. 

Two lab techs were hovering on either side of him, waiting for instructions, he supposed. He hoped they spoke English.

"Can you bring the tray of tools over here?" he asked the woman on his left cautiously. She nodded and went to retrieve the rolling tray, and he sighed a little in relief.

Newt began to roll up his sleeves in his usual preparation for work. He rolled them up extra-far this time, making sure to fold them up above his elbows. Bioluminescence could get messy.

He was pulling his gloves on as he caught sight of the lab tech on his right. The man, who had been silent so far, had a shocked look on his face, something almost like disgust.

"What?" Newt blurted out instinctively.

"Are those Kaiju?" he asked in accented English.

Newt followed the man's line of sight to his own left arm. "Yeah, man. I've got them all over." He smiled, but the man didn't smile back. His eyes were narrowed.

"Is that...Taurax?" He gestured to the tattoo above Yamarashi, peeking out from Newt's shirt sleeve.

"Yeah." Newt tugged his sleeve up a little further.

He was still looking down at his arm when he felt the first punch.

"What the _fuck_ ," the man next to him was saying, and Newt's head was throbbing. 

"Wha--" Newt began, but a sharp blow to his nose interrupted him. He heard the woman next to him shriek and shout something he didn't understand, and he was ducking his head, covering his face, not sure where the next hit was coming from, and oh _God_ , this was like middle school gym class all over again.

Newt felt a strong tug on his arm, pulling him away from the lab table, back toward the door, and he stumbled blindly in the direction of the pull, belatedly realizing that his glasses were cracked. He'd just replaced those after the whole Otachi incident. 

The hitting seemed to be over, so he took his shattered glasses off, shook his head to clear it, and looked around the lab.

His attacker was being held back by two other lab workers, who were talking to him lowly, seemingly trying to calm him down. One of them glared at Newt when they caught him looking.

It turned out that the savior who had pulled him away from all that punching was the woman he'd first spoken to. She was still holding on his arm, and her other hand was holding a cell phone that she was frantically speaking into.

The lab door swung open a moment later, causing Newt to almost stumble out into the hall, and Hannibal Chau came in.

"What the fuck, Geiszler? I couldn't leave you alone for five minutes?"

"It wasn't me! Your employee attacked me! God, my head..."

The employee in question was looking anything but ashamed. He broke out of his friends' grasps and lunged toward Hannibal, speaking Cantonese so fast that Newt had less than a prayer of understanding a word of it. He was upset, clearly, gesturing toward Newt, looking like he'd like to deck him all over again. Newt shrunk back behind Hannibal a little. It couldn't hurt to have a big beefy guy between him and danger.

Newt stepped back from Hannibal when he realized that he was nodding and... _agreeing_ with the angry man. Hannibal had a reassuring hand on the guy's shoulder and was speaking softly, his words clipped, but with no anger in them. He thumped the man on the shoulder once, just like he had done to Newt earlier, and the man nodded silently in response to Hannibal's words. His nostrils were flaring and he still looked a little bit dangerous, but he shoved past Newt and left the lab without comment.

"Would you like to tell me why I just got assaulted?" Newt asked. He tried to sound tough, but it came out a little nasal because of his swollen nose. He hoped it wasn't broken.

"Surely it wasn't your first time?" Hannibal replied caustically.

"What? What did I even do?"

"I'm not having this conversation here, Geiszler. I'll get my people to wrap up the gland." Hannibal spoke a few directions, then exited the lab, catching Newt's arm and pulling him out behind him. Newt was headed for a dislocated shoulder at this rate.

"Where are we going?" Newt sputtered.

"My room. I've got a first aid kit there."

"Oh, of course you do," Newt mumbled under his breath. Hannibal probably got beat up all the time. Newt, on the other hand, had always found himself to be pretty safe in a laboratory. First time for everything.

Hannibal's room was even gaudier than the rest of the building, and Newt looked around it in shock as Hannibal retrieved a plastic box of supplies from the bathroom. 

A canopy bed made out of Kaiju ivory. Wow.

Hannibal lightly shoved Newt so that he stumbled back and sat down on the edge of the bed. Weren't verbal instructions ever good enough for this guy?

Hannibal sat down next to him, drew some gauze out of the box, and began to pour rubbing alcohol on it.

"Do you honestly not have any idea why you just got the shit beat out of you?" Hannibal said conversationally as he pressed the cloth to Newt's forehead.

"No!" Newt insisted, wincing at the sting of the alcohol. 

"Your tattoos, dumbass. You have fucking Taurax on your arm? Bayani is Filipino. Taurax killed half his family."

Newt was struck dumb. He'd had people talk shit about his tattoos, of course, stare or tell him they were disgusting, but he hadn't faced someone who'd lost family to the same Kaiju he wore on his skin. 

_No wonder he punched me,_ Newt thought. _And thank God Mako never saw my Onibaba tattoo._

"Oh," Newt said weakly, once he finally had the presence of mind to speak.

"Yeah, 'oh.' I told him I would have punched you, too." Hannibal moved the cloth from Newt's forehead to his nose, and Newt watched the blood bloom across the gauze. Just when he'd gotten rid of his Drift-induced nosebleeds, too.

"What made you get all that ink, anyway?" Hannibal firmly grasped the bridge of Newt's nose as he spoke, holding it tight in the cloth. He'd clearly dealt with his share of nosebleeds.

"It sounds cheesy and...fucked up, but I feel like the Kaiju...they gave my life meaning, you know?" 

Hannibal lowered the cloth from Newt's nose and raised his eyebrow skeptically, but Newt resolutely continued.

"I was 23 when the first attack hit, not even out of school. It was scientific history, a fucking revelation, being made right in front of my eyes. Then I started working for the PPDC...I got obsessed, I guess. I wanted to _know_. I wanted to know everything about them. I wanted to understand. I thought I could find their weakness or something, find out what makes them tick. They were like gods, you know? They were beyond our comprehension. If I could be the one to understand..."

"You might be the one with the god complex, kiddo." 

"Well my obsession worked out, didn't it? Here I am...big damn hero who saved the world. Big damn hero...with a concussion."

Hannibal chuckled quietly, his voice so deep that the bed seemed to shake a little. 

"I probably did idolize them too much. I thought about the biology of it all, the parts that ended up in my lab... I didn't think about everyone they hurt. I guess I needed my little run-in with Otachi to set me straight."

Hannibal laughed again. "Don't even bring up that bitch. I'm still having flashbacks of getting swallowed by her baby."

"Does that mean you'll kick my ass if I get Baby tattooed on my hip? I've drawn up a design." 

Hannibal's visible eye glared, and Newt burst into nervous laughter. "Kidding! Kidding! I've had about all of the closeup views of that little sucker I'll ever want to see."

"Your nose stopped bleeding." Hannibal reached up and patted it with the gauze once more for good measure, ignoring Newt's wince of pain.

"And you didn't even have to kiss it better." _Whoa, where did that come from?_ Newt hadn't meant to get flirty, but his possibly concussed brain seemed to have decided that he and Hannibal were having a moment or something.

His nervousness turned to shock when Hannibal leaned forward, bridged the gap between them, and kissed Newt square on the mouth. His lips were large, slightly chapped, warm and firm, pressing against Newt's lips and moving a little, almost luring Newt to part his own lips by instinct.

Hannibal moved back before Newt could react, and Newt stared at him, stunned.

"He didn't punch me on my mouth," Newt blurted out.

"So?" Hannibal grinned, showing all his gold teeth, and Newt couldn't help but smile back.

"I want to apologize to Bayani. Even though he made me bleed. I can see why he was pissed."

"Good call. Sometimes you've gotta take your licks, kid." Hannibal paused. "I'll ask someone else to help you out in the lab next time you're here."

"I'm still hired? Even after I started a riot in your lab?"

"I trust things will go more smoothly next time."

"Oh, they will. Scout's honor."

"You better take the rest of the day off, though. I don't want you bleeding on my specimens."

"Bummer...but I understand." 

"We could get dinner after work? My treat." Hannibal's arm wrapped around his shoulders, warm and heavy, and Newt was nodding his agreement before he even realized what he was doing.

"I'll keep my tattoos covered up. Don't want anymore trouble today."

"Sounds good." Hannibal leaned close then, speaking right into his ear. " _I_ wouldn't mind seeing them sometime, though. _All_ of them."

Newt sighed happily. "It's a date."


End file.
